Massive 5,000-year-old cemetery found in east Africa... was built by earliest herders

WASHINGTON DC: Scientists have discovered the earliest and largest monumental cemetery in eastern Africa built 5,000 years ago by early pastoralists.

The Lothagam North Pillar Site was built around Lake Turkana in Kenya by a group believed to have had an egalitarian society, without a stratified social hierarchy.

The construction of such a large public project contradicts long-standing narratives about early complex societies, which suggest that a stratified social structure is necessary to enable the construction of large public buildings or monuments.

The Lothagam North Pillar Site was a communal cemetery constructed and used over a period of several centuries, between about 5,000 and 4,300 years ago.

According to the researchers at Stony Brook University in the US and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, early herders built a platform approximately 30 metres in diameter and excavated a large cavity in the centre to bury their dead.

After the cavity was filled and capped with stones, the builders placed large, megalith pillars, some sourced from as much as a kilometer away, on top. Stone circles and cairns were added nearby.

An estimated minimum of 580 individuals were densely buried within the central platform cavity of the site. Men, women, and children of different ages, from infants to the elderly, were all buried in the same area, without any particular burials being singled out with special treatment.

All individuals were buried with personal ornaments and the distribution of ornaments was approximately equal throughout the cemetery, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.